I'm not sure that I actually saw more than two pitches of Brian Matusz's start last night until the fourth inning. I relied on the live box score and quick glances at the scoreboard. The First-Year Player Draft forced my attention away from the field, but that won't happen tonight, since today's picks started a little after noon. In the fifth round with the 155th overall selection, the Orioles chose Middle Georgia College left-hander Matt Taylor. Taylor was 7-5 with a 3.31 ERA in 16...

In the third round of the First-Year Player Draft, the Orioles used the 94th overall selection on East Carolina right-hander Mike Wright. Baseball America rated Wright as a fifth- or sixth-round talent and the 74th-best right-hander in the draft. The Orioles disagree. Wright was 6-4 with a 2.79 ERA in 16 starts, with 30 walks and 75 strikeouts in 100 innings. He lost 2-0 to St. John's in Game 2 of the Charlottesville Regional on Friday, allowing two runs and seven hits, with four walks and...

The Orioles also had the fourth pick in the second round of today's First-Year Player Draft, and the 64th overall selection. They used it to take Vanderbilt junior third baseman Jason Esposito. Esposito batted .362 this year, with 22 doubles, eight homers, 55 RBIs and a .560 slug percentage in 60 games. Baseball America calls the 6-foot-2, 200-pound Esposito "a college version of Marlins prospect Matt Dominguez in that his glove is ahead of his bat." He played shortstop this spring, but is...

The Single-A Delmarva Shorebirds will host the South Atlantic League All-Star game June 21 in Salisbury and the team will be well represented in the game. Manny Machado and four of his teammates have been named All-Stars. Machado will be the starting shortstop for the Northern Division team and will be joined on the squad by Delmarva's Ty Kelly, Michael Ohlman, Jacob Pettit and David Walters. The game will feature the top three draft picks from 2010, as Bryce Harper of Hagerstown, the top...

If I were a Washington National, the ever-changing daily lineup would start to bother me after a while. It's not because I don't trust manager Jim Riggleman to do his job. I do. He's had his eyes and ears inside Major League Baseball for longer than a decent chunk of the roster. The issue to be taken here isn't with Riggleman but rather with a lack of consistency. Imagine being a kid again and playing in a summer league or school league for any sport. In those days, it wasn't about...

I recently read an interesting Wall Street Journal article by Matthew Futterman that, like many statistical analyses these days, challenged conventional baseball wisdom. In this instance, the cherished-but-challenged wisdom is as follows: "It's not a sprint, it's a marathon." Futterman writes that baseball is in fact very much a sprint and that the beloved boys of summer generally know how they'll finish the season even before the summer solstice. Here's a key passage from the...

Orioles scouting director Joe Jordan said he "got the guy he wanted" in drafting Dylan Bundy with the fourth pick in the first round last night. But was Bundy really the guy the Orioles wanted all along? "This was always the guy we had in our sights and that was going to be in the conversation," Jordan said. "There were just a lot of good players at the top of the draft. We knew coming in he would be in play for us and he didn't do anything to disappoint us. There was no one we had any...

The Nationals selected University of Kentucky right-hander Alex Meyer and Miami (Dade) Junior College outfielder Brian Goodwin with the No. 23 and No. 34 selections overall, respectively. With Anthony Rendon at No. 6, general manager Mike Rizzo, flanked by director of scouting Kris Kline and Nationals vice president of player personnel Roy Clark, were very happy with the first day haul at the 2011 draft. "These are three guys that we identified very early as a scouting department," Clark...

Later today, my focus will return to the First-Year Player Draft, as the Orioles make another batch of selections and announce names you've never heard. Before that happens, I wanted to share some postgame quotes from last night. It's apparent that left-hander Brian Matusz isn't back to his old form, the one that enabled him to go 6-0 with a 1.57 ERA in his last eights starts of 2010, but his winning streak reached a career-high seven games last night. He must be doing something...

The Orioles arranged a late conference call with first-round pick Dylan Bundy, who talked about watching the First-Year Player Draft with another Oklahoma high school pitcher, Archie Bradley, chosen by the Diamondbacks with the seventh selection. "Me and Archie were both sitting there in that huge ballroom with a bunch of our friends and family and saw the fourth pick flash over, and we had a pretty good idea it might be one of us, but we weren't sure," Bundy said. "And then my name got...